Friday, October 26, 2007

Oh no! I have to wake up very early tomorrow … When? … Before 6 am. Yes it’s very early if you compare with my existing schedule. But can’t help as tomorrow I have to attend a Java conference at Hinjewadi…. Thoughts like these were there in my mind one day before the conference. And sad thing was that it was a Kojagiri night. (You can read more about funny item we gave that night here).

Yes! I made it. I was there in BM office at around 7:30 AM. Thanks to Smita! She performed better than Nokia clock-Alarm :) And we left towards Hinjewadi on our bikes.

Symbiosis campus is just amazing! Needless to say that I recalled my PICT days and of course InC days to mention explicitly. After registration we had a breakfast which was good. And now let’s go to the sessions!

Okay okay … before going into each and every sessions details let me tell you that there was a Java Quiz also. And I am proud to say that we attempted correct answers on day1 and day 2 as well. I will write about the prizes in my next write up.

Our first session was from Prayank Swaroop who was from Adobe. He talked on Rich Internet Applications and Flex. He was amazing in his presentation. He had shown us the demo of FlexBook which was truly jaw dropping! As a result of this once the session got over we started discussing can we use Flex in dhg-web? :)

As there was a change in schedule for some sessions we attended Spring tutorial by Peter Thomas from Satyam. I found Thomas a true lover of Spring. After every 10 mins he was asking to use Spring. Couple of his dialogs were too interesting: “Don’t create custom frameworks anymore use Spring”, “Don’t use singleton anymore, don’t use new() in your code … use Spring”, “Spring has ended up killing EJBs”, “Hibernate people say don’t use Spring” etc etc. Long back I heard about Spring from Chirag V. I did not know Spring but Peters session has given me good overview of Spring. Now I am planning ofgoing through it.

Lunch Time! Worth mentioning … of course if Preetam will not talk about food then who will talk? ;-) Had (a little because have to attend next sessions also!) good food. Have I mentioned that I met some of my old Dhankawadi friends there? Oh yes, very surprisingly I met Nilesh Birajdar and Bharat. Nilesh was in BVP, one batch junior to me and we were living very nearby @ IIT-D (it’s not IIT Delhi but its IIT Dhankawadi … needles to say we call the campus of BVP+PICT as IIT-D. hahaha!). Bharat was junior to me in PICT. Also I met Ashish who was used to say in my next Apartment @ Nagar. Surprisingly all these people are from Reflexis. Good to see you guys there!

After lunch we were under impression that now we will be witnessing the traditional “M$ Vs Java” war! But the speaker (I forgot the name of the speaker who was from Microsoft) didn’t touch that aspect at all and talked about the interoperability! Very good. Instead of fighting if we join the hands then we can deliver more; hmm? He talked on Office Open XML format and told us, how Microsoft office technologies can be integrated in Java platform. He also had given a small demo on Web services which was very basic: a “Hello World” web service. Further he had shown some good demos of Silverlight. At the end (no need to say) we impressed by Silverlight!

Next session was amazing! A well-known personality from EJB3 world : Debu Panda talked on “Spring and EJB3”. Wow! This is the stuff for which I was waiting for! Debu had given a precise comparison of these two technologies and very satisfactory answers to some of my questions. One question I would like to mention here: “Debu, what you say what will be there after 5 years EJB / Spring / Something else” Controversial question. And Debu answered it safely: “EJB will be there as an average project has a lifetime of at least 5 years. So EJB will be there.” He didn’t talk about Spring but said technologies will keep coming. Anyways safe answer! But I guess DR will have some better some philosophical answer to this! Debu is not only a HiTek personality but does good marketing also. I end up purchasing his book “EJB3 in Action”. Debu signed on it for me. Debu what about starting a “Debu Panda Signature Book” series? (Just like Martin!) :)

Meanwhile Preeti and Smita attended session on Wicket. They said it’s a component based server side framework for UI. That’s it. Even I don’t know about it. Will find out more about this afterwards :)Ha forgot to tell one sad thing. After lunch Meenal was not feeling well so we asked her to go home. Next day Amit attended instead of her.Tea Break: Though it’s not possible to get 4minar style tea here but anyways I had it ;-)

Chris Schalk from Google talked next on JSF and Ajax. He was good. Shown us many demos of open source JSF and Ajax frameworks. But after this session I was thinking should I wait for JSF 2.0? I don’t know. Maybe I need some study :)

The 1st day ended here. But there was one more drama to go. What to do with Meenals Scooty? Smita comfortably said that she will drive to BM office though I was unsure about this. To add some more "tadaka" to the situation Ashwins bike got punctured. And now Meenals scooty refused to start! Now what? As usual do not panic ... we are at Hinjewadi and not in African Jungle :) Finally the scooty started and we also found out a garage. This drama ended successfully when Smita reached home safely. Her longest ride in her life: Hinjewadi to Gadital, Hadapsar !